The Larry Sanders Show

BLOGGERS NOTE: This post originally appeared on the Wonders in the Dark blog for their Top 80 Greatest Television Shows.

In the 1980s and 1990s, late night talk shows ruled the airwaves with the likes of Johnny Carson, David Letterman and Jay Leno making America laugh before bedtime. These shows would come on after the 11 o’clock news and start with the host delivering a monologue poking fun at the popular news topics of the day followed by a couple of celebrities pushing their movie or television show and ending with a musical act or a stand-up comedian. It’s a format that continues to this day as a new generation of talk show hosts vie for eyeballs in our increasingly fragmented popular culture.

The Larry Sanders Show took a look behind-the-scenes at a fictional late night talk show featuring its vain, neurotic eponymous host (Garry Shandling), his weasely sidekick Hank Kingsley (Jeffrey Tambor), the gruff, ass-kissing producer Arthur (Rip Torn), and the other long-suffering staff members that cater to his selfish needs as they try to get a show on the air. Larry lives in constant fear, either worrying about if he’s funny every night or if the show’s getting good enough ratings to justify its existence, and do almost anything to achieve both.

The show was notable for being one of the first sitcoms to push the envelope in terms of truly uncomfortable moments mixed with laughs. Of course, this practice is commonplace now with shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm and the short-lived Starved. These uncomfortable moments, like snide asides between Hank and guests in between commercial breaks, have a ring of honesty to them and make one wonder if that’s what it’s really like on these shows. Garry Shandling used to guest host for Johnny Carson, had appeared on all of the major late night talk shows, and must’ve had plenty of experiences to draw from and it shows as there is a real insider authenticity to how a show like this operates.

And there are certainly several classics, like “Everybody Loves Larry” where Larry is afraid that the network is going to replace him with Jon Stewart and fends off what he thinks is romantic advances from David Duchovny. This episode playfully toys with the notion of whether he is gay or not, which drives Larry crazy, of course. There is a funny bit where Larry asks Hank’s assistant (Scott Thompson) if he thinks Duchovny is gay. The final scene that they have together is priceless as Duchovny keeps poor Larry constantly guessing and on edge.

In “Another List,” network executives give Larry some ideas on how he could improve the show, like a more energetic opening like Jay Leno, a new part in his hair and a new theme song – all of which he duly ignores in favor of trying to date Winona Ryder. Of course, by the end of the episode, he has incorporated some of these ideas because at the end of the day, self-preservation is Larry’s strongest instinct.

“The Interview” starts off with Hank insulting guest star Vince Vaughn when he fails to pick up on the actor simply messing with him. This episode poses the question, how does a celebrity do damage control? Larry cries during an interview for Extra! and Artie tries to get the interviewer to edit it out with little success. This episode underlines the often-vain nature of celebrities. Their image lives or dies by how they are covered by the fickle media.

The Larry Sanders Show demonstrates what a fearless performer Garry Shandling was as he wasn’t afraid to play a thoroughly unlikable character. Larry is a vain coward that only loves himself and that’s on a good day. Shandling is also not afraid to use comedy to bring out the uncomfortable truths about Larry.

Jeffrey Tambor matches Shandling beat-for-beat with his portrayal of Hank, which is, at times, almost too painful to watch as he is such a pathetic, sad sack character. We never feel one iota of sympathy for him because he is his own worst enemy. He is obviously patterned after another famous show biz sidekick, Ed McMahon, swimming in Larry’s wake. Hank is petty and always trying to get out from under Larry’s shadow. During the course of the show, Tambor explores what it takes to play someone who is the sidekick. What kind of person is able to do that and how does it affect their personality over time?

Artie’s job is to build up Larry’s confidence. He’s an expert at catering to people’s egos, making them feel good about themselves. Larry and Artie have a funny, cantankerous relationship that sees the producer simultaneously appease and bust Larry’s balls. In many respects, Artie keeps Larry grounded and is one of the few people he can be honest with. They bicker like an old married couple but one senses that they truly are friends.

The Larry Sanders Show is a brilliant snapshot of what late night talk shows were like during the ‘80s and ‘90s when Leno and Letterman ruled the airwaves. It takes us behind the curtain to show that Larry is a selfish narcissist, Hank is a pathetic loser, and Artie has mastered the art of kissing ass while savaging people behind their backs.

The Larry Sanders Show was ahead of its time, pushing the envelope in mining comedy out of awkward and uncomfortable situations, anticipating shows like The Office by many years. It showed the messiness of life intruding on a bunch of show biz types trying to put on a T.V. show. It makes you wonder if this is what it actually takes to do one of these shows and if so it is amazing that new episodes air as often as they do.

Beach Red

In his book of collected film criticism, Ghosts in the Machine, Michael Atkinson makes a convincing argument that actor/director Cornel Wilde is more of a maverick filmmaker than the much more celebrated Sam Fuller. To be fair, Wilde has far fewer directorial efforts than Fuller – only nine – but each one attempts to push the boundaries of genre and audience expectations. This is certainly true of Beach Red (1967), an adaptation of Peter Bowman’s 1945 novella of the same name, which is a visceral, unsentimental look a group of United States Marines that land on an unnamed Japanese fortified island in the Pacific during World War II. The film features the occasional surreal imagery that anticipates Apocalypse Now (1979), harrowing battle scenes that likely inspired the ones in Saving Private Ryan (1998), and voiceover narration of various soldiers’ thoughts coupled with flashbacks of their lives back home done years before Terrence Malick would do the same in The Thin Red Line (1998).

To wit, the film’s first image is that of a jungle a split second before it is blown up – one that Francis Ford Coppola would steal outright and use for even more dramatic effect in the aforementioned Apocalypse Now. The opening credits play over paintings of battle scenes depicting Japanese and American pastoral settings while Jean Wallace (Wilde's wife) sings the mournful title song, establishing the anti-war stance this film takes.

In an audacious move, the last painting morphs into the first scene as we meet the tough-talking Marines en route to a Japanese island. They gripe amongst each other while Captain MacDonald (Cornel Wilde) looks over his men and shares his thoughts about war via voiceover narration, anticipating a similar technique employed by Malick in his own World War II epic. However, Wilde is not the thoughtful philosopher Malick is and MacDonald’s musings definitely skew closer to the no-nonsense prose of Sam Fuller. We also get the inner thoughts of soldiers scared of dying, which is quite effective as they sit in a boat headed for the island and an uncertain fate.

The beach landing is rendered in brutal fashion as men are shot and killed before they reach the beach. Wilde does an excellent job of giving a sense of scale with long shots of hundreds of men wading through the water while explosions go off around them and bullets whiz by dangerously. He doesn’t shy away from the horrors as soldiers wade past severed limbs and a young man, paralyzed by fear, gets an arm blown off by mortar fire in a scene later recycled in Saving Private Ryan. There is a refreshing lack of sentimentality as Wilde grimly depicts the brutality of war and arbitrary nature of death. Why do some men die while others are spared? Beach Red suggests that is random and many survive by sheer luck.

While Wilde and co-star Rip Torn get significant screen-time, no one character is fully developed – the filmmaker has bigger fish to fry. He’s more interested in depicting the horrors of war in unflinching detail. The refusal to focus on one or two characters puts the viewer off balance because they don’t know who to identify with and this adds to the unpredictable nature of Beach Red.

Wilde also gives significant screen-time to the Japanese, showing one of its commanders thinking about his wife and life at home. He also shows some of their devious tactics, like putting a decoy up in a tree for the Marines to shoot at and then kill them, or Japanese soldiers dressing up like American ones in order to get close enough to kill them. He also attempts to humanize the Japanese by presenting a scene where we see foot soldiers getting ready for the advancing Marines and they joke and talk amongst themselves – one guy even sketches a flower to the pass the time. This prevents them from being rendered as merely anonymous monsters.

Wilde employs all sorts of ballsy techniques for the time, like briefly adopting a first person point-of-view of a Marine making his way through tall grass en route to stopping a Japanese machine gun nest. The filmmaker also uses freeze frames to capture a soldier’s fear of stabbing himself with his own bayonet in jarringly effective fashion. In another scene, MacDonald’s flashback about his wife back home is rendered via a montage of still images while she laughs about something, which is followed by footage of her embracing him as she gets upset that he is going to war. These broad strokes succinctly show what’s at stake for him. Wilde doesn’t telegraph these techniques but rather crudely inserts them for maximum effect. The unconventional way he uses these techniques keeps us constantly on edge and adds to the unpredictable nature of the film.

It is interesting to note that Beach Red came out when the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War was heating up and one can’t help but wonder if Wilde meant his film to be a warning, of sorts, about the brutality of such conflict. This is particularly apparent when the Marines make their way through dense jungle not unlike the ones in ‘Nam.

For a film made in the late 1960s, the depiction of violence is surprisingly graphic, anticipating Sam Peckinpah’s orgy of carnage in The Wild Bunch (1969). Beach Red certainly lives up to its name as men have limbs blown off, are shot in the neck, are brutally stabbed, and have arms broken with sickening snaps. Wilde’s lack of polish as a filmmaker actually works in the film’s favor as it reinforces the visceral depiction of war in a way that more sophisticated films do not. He manages to eschew the two-fisted heroics of some of Fuller’s war films in favor of gritty realism mixed with experimental techniques. Beach Red doesn’t really say anything new about war but does find new ways of depicting its hellish nature.

Extreme Prejudice

Film director Walter Hill has had, at times, a frustratingly and wildly uneven career that features stone cold classics (The Warriors) alongside baffling misfires (Crossroads). His main stock and trade is old school tough guy action films and they don’t come anymore badass than the criminally underrated Extreme Prejudice (1987). Based on a story co-written by John Milius (Apocalypse Now) and starring Nick Nolte and Powers Boothe, it was Hill’s two-fisted homage to the films of Sam Peckinpah who he had worked for early on his career as the screenwriter for The Getaway (1972). Like many of Hill’s own action films, Extreme Prejudice is a modern western featuring two uncompromising men at odds with one another.

Six mysterious men show up in El Paso, Texas. Officially listed as dead by the United States government, they are part of an elite top-secret military unit led by the no-nonsense Paul Hackett (Michael Ironside), a D.E.A. agent. We soon meet Texas Ranger Jack Benteen (Nick Nolte), a lawman with the cojones to go into a crowded Mexican bar with a loaded rifle looking for a suspect only to coolly gun him down when the guy pulls a pistol. He teams up with local county sheriff Hank Pearson (Rip Torn), the man who taught him how to be a lawman. It turns out that the suspect was a “poor dirt farmer” running dope for Cash Bailey (Powers Boothe) in order to make ends meet. Cash is the local drug kingpin and a man so tough he lets a scorpion crawl along his hand before crushing it. He and Jack were best friends in high school but now they are on opposite sides of the law. Unbeknownst to Jack, Hackett and his men are intent on busting Cash as well.

Nick Nolte plays one of Hill’s trademark laconic men of action and of few words, like the enigmatic getaway driver in The Driver (1978), Swan in The Warriors (1979) and Tom Cody in Streets of Fire (1984). Jack and Cash are throwbacks to a bygone era. 100 years ago they’d have been gunslingers in the Wild West. Nolte has got the steely determination thing down cold and an innate understanding of Hill’s worldview, embodying it with ease. Like many of the director’s protagonists, Jack doesn’t like to talk about his feelings, not even to his long-suffering girlfriend (Maria Conchita Alonso). He’d rather do something than talk about it. It’s great to see him reunited with Hill after their initial collaboration on 48 Hrs. (1982). In an ideal world, they would be making all kinds of films together with Nolte the De Niro to Hill’s Scorsese, both bringing out the best in each other.

For the role of Jack, Hill wanted someone who was “representative of the tradition of the American West – taciturn, stoical, enduring,” and had Nolte watch a lot of films starring Gary Cooper, Randolph Scott and John Wayne. Nolte wanted to recapture “the demeanor of how those ‘40s characters carried themselves – how they dressed and carried their guns.” In order to play a credible Texas Ranger, the actor asked writer friend Peter Gent (North Dallas Forty) to recommend someone to act as a model for his character. Gent suggested real-life Ranger Joaquin Jackson. He and Nolte went over the screenplay and incorporated more of the type of language Rangers use and their relationship with other law enforcement agencies.

In a precursor to his grinning baddie in Tombstone (1993), Powers Boothe plays a genial antagonist in Extreme Prejudice while also sporting a dapper white suit. Cash sees the drug trade as simply giving the people what they want. Early on, Boothe has a nice scene with Nolte where their two characters meet and Jack warns Cash that if he crosses the border into the U.S. he will bust him and his operation. Unfazed and as cool as they come, Cash says to his old friend, “I got a feeling the next time we run into each other we’re gonna have a killing. Just a feeling.” Think of this scene as the pulpy precursor to the legendary diner scene in Heat (1995) between Robert De Niro and Al Pacino only with two legendary character actors instead. The message in both scenes is the same: the next time Cash and Jack meet, one of them is not going to survive the encounter. For any fan of these two actors, this scene (and their final one at the end of the film) is a lot of fun to watch as these forces of nature square off against each other with Cash being gregarious yet still threatening and Jack all stoic determination. With his portrayal, Boothe has said that he wanted Cash to be “multi-faceted, a fully-rounded human being.” I don’t know if he achieves that exactly, but Cash is certainly more than a mere stock villainous character.

The cast of Extreme Prejudice is populated with an embarrassment of character acting riches. William Forsythe (The Devil’s Rejects) plays a grinning good ol’ boy troublemaker; Michael Ironside (Scanners) is the all-business leader of a group of soldiers; Clancy Brown (Highlander) is one of his reliable henchmen; and Rip Torn plays Jack’s mentor who recognizes what Cash represents: “How it comes around. Right way’s the hardest. Wrong way’s the easiest. Rule of nature, like water seeks the path of least resistance so you get crooked rivers and crooked men.” Well said, sir!

Hill not only indulges in his Peckinpah admiration with some of the film’s themes but more explicitly in how he stages and edits the exciting action sequences complete with slow motion carnage that culminates in the climactic bloodbath between Jack, Hackett and his men and Cash and his private army that evokes the penultimate showdown in The Wild Bunch (1969). This is also evident Hill’s storytelling method as Extreme Prejudice is trimmed of any unnecessary narrative fat. Every scene services the story with refreshing efficiency by someone who knows how to tell a story and tell it well.

At the time, Extreme Prejudice was viewed as Hill’s take on the drug wars and the U.S. government’s handling of it with Jack as his mouthpiece when he tells Hackett at one point, “Bunch of bureaucratic fat asses fluffing their duff. They been sitting on my request for drug information for over a year but it’s classified. They’re afraid somebody or some country’s gonna get their feelings hurt.” Hill clearly sees the government as an impediment rather than a resource to men like Jack who are fighting the war in the trenches, dealing with it on a daily basis. The director said in an interview that he saw the film as a critique of “machismo politics” and of “American military involvement beyond our borders, beyond constitutional means.”

Extreme Prejudice is highly critical of the drug wars but refuses to be preachy about it as is the tendency of films like Traffic (2000). Hill is more interested in depicting the struggles of foot soldiers like Jack and how it affects him personally. It also suggests that the government regards people like Hackett and his men as “just numbers on a bureaucratic desk,” as one character puts it. Jack and Cash are above all that because they don’t care about the system. They work within it when they have to but have their own personal code of honor, which they follow. This highly critical viewpoint may explain why it took 10 years for the film to get made, going through several studios and directors because of its “political ramifications” as Boothe said in an interview.

Extreme Prejudice received a perfunctory theatrical release and was not a commercial success. It received mostly positive reviews from critics. Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and wrote, “What makes the film good are Hill’s style and the acting.” In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “If Mr. Hill, whose best films have a genuinely hard-boiled glamour, never intends this as parody, neither is he ever more than a hair away.” The Chicago Tribune’s Dave Kehr wrote, “If characters are caught in a shrinking world that leaves no room for notions as grand as ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ but only a sordid, creeping malignancy that levels everything in its path.” In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas wrote, “Sensational rather than serious, it is an exploitation picture but one with class: it has style, a point to make that happens to be highly topical and, thankfully, a dry, saving sense of humor.” However, the Washington Post’s Richard Harrington felt that “there are simply too many problems, starting with Hill’s clumsy exposition and clumsier development.” Newsweek magazine’s David Ansen was also critical of “Hill’s calcified, comic-book notion of movie machismo.” Extreme Prejudice has largely been forgotten, even by fans of Hill’s films, but deserves to be rediscovered and recognized as one of his very best efforts.

NOTE: This post was inspired by Sean Gill's own highly entertaining review over at his blog.

SOURCES

Lovell, Glenn. “Nick Nolte Far From Down, Out.” Orlando Sentinel. April 29, 1987.

“Names in the News.” Associated Press. April 25, 1987.

Scott, Vernon. “The Rev. Jim Jones Haunts Actor.” United Press International. May 27, 1987.